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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I'm not aware of any serious supply chain or asset provenance efforts that rely on cryptocurrencies or DeFi. Lots of serious work uses Merkle constructions, but it would be a remarkable distortion to spin something like Certificate Transparency as a form of DeFi.

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I’m aware of a use case where person/asset location is being determined using a distributively owned set of radio transmitters so that proof-of-location can be established without use of GPS.

Plenty of supply chain use cases already exist using private chains/ledgers — this will skew more toward public chains or hybrid solutions as demands for transparency amp up.

> I’m aware of a use case where person/asset location is being determined using a distributively owned set of radio transmitters so that proof-of-location can be established without use of GPS.

...why?

GPS is spoofable… you’re a security guy, you should know this :p

Yes, I am. I'm not aware of a threat model in which you can't trust the frequencies GPS is on but you can trust the frequencies that the FCC allows personal radio transmissions to be on. Seems like a lot of added complexity (and, notably, no legal recourse) for essentially the same failure mode.

https://www.wired.com/story/spoof-jam-destroy-why-we-need-a-...

Yes, GPS is not particularly secure. But I don't think that addresses the threat model above.

(In general, jamming is always a possibility with anything wireless. That is just not going to change. What might change is spoof resistance, which can be accomplished with schemes that are a lot simpler than anything DeFi can conjure. There's a decent amount of work on related schemes in the vehicle-to-vehicle communication space.)

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